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Poster Sessions

A student researcher presents his poster at the 2012 National Conference on Health Statistics Poster Session.

The goal of the 2012 NCHS Poster Session was to offer a venue for researchers to present original research on health, health data, and statistics, and provide a forum for informal discussion with interested colleagues. There was a special focus on students and two student award opportunities:

The Student Research Showcase which recognized the best poster abstracts first authored by a student

The Student Poster Prize which recognized the best poster presentations by a student.

We received an unprecedented number of poster abstract submissions with nearly half from student researchers. Among all submissions, over half were from an educational institution, 32% were from a government agency, and the remaining were from another organization. Abstracts covered a diverse range of topics, including nutrition/obesity/physical acitivity (14% of submissions), maternal and child health (11%), health disparities (9%), mental health (8%), and other areas. All abstracts, from students and nonstudents, went through a rigorous blinded review and scoring by reviewers from the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS). A total of 94 out of 132 posters were accepted for presentation during the poster session and an additional 4 were offered the Student Research Showcase opportunity. This represented an overall 74% acceptance rate (students: 73%; non-students: 74%).

Poster Presentation Sessions

Student Research Showcase – The following four students with exceptional abstracts based on judges scores presented their research orally in lieu of a poster presentation. The oral presentations were given during the Student Research Showcase (SS-33), held on Wednesday, August 8th 2012 from 10:30 am to 12:00 pm.

Lauren Au, MS, RD“Vitamin D Intakes and Status among US Children Aged 1 to 18 Years: Do Obese and Racially/Ethnically Diverse Youth Need More Vitamin D?”
Lauren Au is a doctoral student in Food Policy & Applied Nutrition at Tufts University's Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy. Ms. Au earned a Bachelor in Science in Nutritional Sciences, Dietetics from University of California, Berkeley and completed her Dietetic Internship and Masters in Nutrition and Public Health from Columbia University. Ms. Au is currently examining the influences of adiposity and skin color to serum vitamin D. Her research involves determining the vitamin D intakes needed to meet recommended serum vitamin D and understanding adherence to taking vitamin D supplements in ethnically diverse children. She hopes to apply her research and food policy background to a post-doctoral position in government.

Janet Gingold, MD, MPH “Association of special health care needs and parental mental health and parenting stress with sedentary lifestyles in children”
Janet Gingold earned her MPH in Epidemiology from the University of Maryland College Park in May 2012. She holds an MD and a BA in Environmental Studies from the University of Michigan. She did her pediatric residency at the University of Rochester and is certified by the American Board of Pediatrics. Her interest in social determinants of health and modifiable factors that affect health outcomes grew out her experience as a primary care pediatrician treating disadvantaged families. Her recent projects have focused on physical activity, asthma management, health disparities, and relationships between parental attitudes and children's activities.

Elizabeth Lancet, MPH “Urban and Rural Disparities in Tobacco Use”
Elizabeth Lancet, the Assistant Vice President for Research at the American Lung Association, obtained an undergraduate degree at Hunter College in New York and her graduate degree at Boston University. She is currently attending the Graduate Center of the City University of New York for her Doctorate in Public Health. She joined the American Lung Association in 1999 as the Associate, Epidemiology and Statistics and became Director of the unit in 2004. For two years, she worked at the Nassau County Department of Health as an Epidemiologist, charged with analyzing Long Island’s first Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance Survey. In 2007, she returned to the American Lung Association to head their multi-million dollar Research Program, as well as, the Epidemiology and Statistics Unit. Her current interest lies in Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease, as well as, cancer and diabetes. Elizabeth has been a long-time advocate and supporter for increased COPD surveillance on the National Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System and represents the American Lung Association on a number of government sponsored workgroups; most recently, the Healthy People 2020 Respiratory Diseases Objective Workgroup.

Megan Schuler, MS“Generalizing Observational Study Results: Applying Propensity Score Methods to Complex Surveys”
Megan Schuler is a PhD student in the Department of Mental Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Her primary research interests include substance use and causal inference statistics methods. Megan completed a BS in mathematics at Tulane University and an MS in biostatistics at the Medical University of South Carolina. Her MS thesis was titled “Concordance of urine drug screens and self-reported use in cocaine clinical trials.” She was a Summer Associate at the RAND Corporation and has interned at the Drug Policy Alliance.

Student Poster Prize – Judges from NCHS visited all student posters. Each student provided a 5 minute overview of his or her poster and answered questions from the judges. Based on judges scores, six student posters were selected as finalists for the Outstanding Student Poster Awards. During the Plenary Session on Wednesday, August 8, the top 3 Outstanding Student Posters were announced and the presenters were recognized with an award and and their photograph taken with Dr. Edward Sondik, the Director of the National Center for Health Statistics.
The 6 student finalists and the award winners were: